I have been an active member at Stack Overflow for more than an year. And I have noticed that as Stack Overflow started introducing so many sub sites of Stack Overflow, no of visitors got splitted among multiple sub sites resulting in late answers to the questions and ultimately fall in visitors.

For few 3-4 months, I saw a decline in myself in usage of Stack Overflow. Reason is not because I have less questions and I usually know more solutions but reason is that I can find an answer to my questions in lesser time than posting it on Stack Overflow.

Now a days if I posts a question on Stack Overflow, I usually gets an answer in 6-7 hours atleast which was previously 3-5 minutes and that counts a lot.

Is it an end of Stack Overflow for me. Because I cannot wait for a question to be answered at such a long time and rather opt for searching.

3 Answers
3

I think you have a slight misunderstanding. Stack Overflow wasn't really split, unless you consider Programmers one, which in honesty covers a complete different set of programming issues then Stack Overflow.

The purpose of multiple different Stack Exchange sites is to provide a broader range of topics, and a more specialized community around those topics. Ask Ubuntu is a good example of this, since there is a solid Ubuntu community, and a dedicated site to just that topic is hugely successful.

I briefly ran through your latest questions list, and every single one of your questions I looked at received an answer in less then an hour of the time of it being posted, if the question was on topic. However, it can sometimes take some time for someone to come along and have the right answer, especially if it is an edge case question, or a language/tag with a low following. Although you have a decent accept rate, there are some newer questions that don't have accepted answers, in which case it may deter some hard code Stack Overflow users not to answer.

@Duagi: I do agree with you at some point but i am not convinced. I understand making StackOverflow for careers, gaming, beta seems to make some sense to me. But if you check my frequency of asking my questions has a steep fall which could have gone from 2-3 questions a day to 1-2 questions a month. I used to had Stackoverflow as my default home page but it has now turned out to be Google again. About my last question if you notice some previous questions and going little deeper you might get better statistics. Answer to Last question was pretty quick but still there is a steep decline n users
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Shantanu GuptaJan 20 '11 at 21:38

First thing, it depends on the complexity of the question you are asking too. Over the period of time, there are lots and lots of questions which are already asked on SO and you find it more difficult to get a good or new question onto SO.

You will have to be patient to except a quality answer from SO, but sure at the end of the day you will get it. Thats what I believe in.

The SO split into multiple domains does not mean, people will get split. Because SO has a specific set of questions pertaining to topics which are not covered in other domains. Similarly each domain has its own boudaries for asking questions.

for your second para I would say suppose I have a network programming related question. Usually two kind of users can participate in this question i.e. ServerExchange users as well as Programmers but splitting into multiple domains. ServerExchange users cannot see or make concepts clear in better way. This is what I realized in few months. :(
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Shantanu GuptaJan 20 '11 at 21:41

@Shantanu Gupta - I probably disagree with you, but again I cant comment since I have never been associated with ServerExchange. As far as I know, I can tell that most programmers will also be available on other domains and would surely give their best to give you proper answers.
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Sachin ShanbhagJan 21 '11 at 5:25

I doubt that is a reason for a drop in your questions' response times. Maybe you can look up the last announcement of pageviews to see if SO traffic really did drop during the last few months of the StackExchange Network. Even if it is, the overall aim (assisting others in topics via collaborative work) seemsto beworking.

Most of your questions (at least from the most recent pages) are c# so I don't think everyone lurks in c# , there must be some other languages people look at right ?

It could also mean you are getting more specific/detailed with your questions (you said you were here a long time so I guess you know the drill) such that it takes longer to digest and respond ?

While you wait for answers why don't you help others with questions :)

While you wait for answers why don't you help others with questions. I keep doing googling to search for answers from other resources. In the past when i used to raise a question at Stack, b4 getting an answer from Google, I used to find answer from Stack or if this is not true atleast visits were used to be usually in 3 digits which is not in current scenario. For C#, you are right that people do look at other languages too. But for C# itself I would say users of C# has dropped.
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Shantanu GuptaJan 20 '11 at 21:45